Sunday, September 23, 2007

His both coming to the United States and his speaking engagement at Columbia University. Ahmadinejad is a right winger who sponsored an obnoxious conference that besides making headlines had no influence on anything. He's being demonized by the United States for largely unrelated reasons having to do with drumming up support for a war with Iran in order to extend U.S. dominance over the Middle East. He has in fact stepped up punishment of people who the Iranian regime considers to be immoral, such as homosexuals, but you could argue that the ultimate cause both of Ahmadinejad being in power and the increase of repression is the United States' tough talk, starting with the labeling of Iran as being a part of the "Axis of Evil" when it had less to do with 9/11 than Iraq did. Iran was on a path of reform, engaging leaders in Europe and tentatively opening up its society in terms of the strictness of the enforcement of social standards. But the increased hostility of the U.S. to Iran changed all that, put the Iranian people on the defensive, with the result that a hard liner was elected.

It's really funny though, seeing the Jewish community's response to him. For the record, and sometimes confusion happens, although I have a long Polish name I'm not Jewish. But I look at this stuff, the calling of Ahmadinejad a "Persian Hitler", although there's not a one person of Jewish descent he's ordered killed because they were Jewish, and wonder if there'd be such an outcry if one of the leaders of either the Croatian, Serb, or Bosnian governments in the Yugoslav civil war who was responsible in some way for the mass murder of civilians on ethnic grounds not sixty years ago but from ten to fifteen years ago came to New York City to speak.

Would Radovan Karadzic be protested as much as Ahmadinejad? But he's threatened Israel! Virtually every hardline leader in the Middle East seems to have done that. Few have actually carried out the threat, knowing that in Noam Chomsky's phrase "they'd be annihilated instantly" if they did it. What about killers who are a little further from the popular consciousness of America because they're not white. Indonesian military commanders who participated in the genocide in East Timor, where the favored method of killing was closing off villages and starving people to death en masse, would they be protested as much as Ahmadinejad? Again, we're talking about real violence that happened to people within the last three decades, not sixty years ago.

It's very strange, these protests. For instance the protest about the Kahlil Gibran Academy opening in New York City. It's an arabic language school, a place that teaches children in both english and arabic. A very telling article in the Jewish press was linked to by Cursor.org a while ago, meaning...last week?....I should be able to find it...anyways, the tone of the article was unbelievable. Here was a Jewish weekly acting like the Jewish community in New York City had the right to decide whether or not the school could exist. The fact that the person in charge of the school, who in the course of many discussions with the leaders of the Jewish community in New York City had been declared "safe", fucked up by not objecting to a tee shirt that had the word "Intifada" on it, because she knew that the word had connotations other than just the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, was seized on to prove that the school was really pro-terrorist.

It makes me think. What other groups does the Jewish community in New York City feel that it has veto power over? Obviously they think that they get to decide what the arabic speaking community can and can't do (while helped with government funds: the school is a public school). Who's next?

It's amazing that anyone is even protesting the school, absolutely amazing. The Jewish community has proven that they're as racist as any other white community out there, which despite their protests they are. People who emigrated from the Middle East over a thousand years ago who are culturally European with a flare of Middle Eastern culture, who are probably genetically more European than Middle Eastern, and whose main difference from the rest of white America is that they follow a different religion discriminating against people from the Middle East....who were born there. It's quite a phenomenon. But no doubt the policy will further endear them to racist backwoods rednecks, whose politics the leaders of the Jewish community are increasingly in line with.